The "Good War" in American Memory

by Bodnar, John

• ISBN13: 9781421405827
• ISBN10: 1421405822
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-12-21
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr

Summary

The "Good War" in American Memory dispels the long-held myth that Americans forged an agreement on why they had to fight in World War II. John Bodnar's sociocultural examination of the vast public debate that took place in the United States over the war's meaning reveals that the idea of the "good war" was highly contested. Bodnar's comprehensive study of the disagreements that marked the American remembrance of World War II in the six decades following its end draws on an array of sources: fiction and nonfiction, movies, theater, and public monuments. He identifies alternative strands of memory -- tragic and brutal versus heroic and virtuous -- and reconstructs controversies involving veterans, minorities, and memorials. In building this narrative, Bodnar shows how the idealism of President Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms was lost in the public commemoration of World War II, how the war's memory became intertwined in the larger discussion over American national identity, and how it only came to be known as the "good war" many years after its conclusion.

Author Biography

John Bodnar is the Chancellors Professor of History and the director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Indiana University. He has authored or edited nine other books, including Blue-Collar Hollywood: Liberalism, Democracy, and Working People in American Film, also published by Johns Hopkins.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Wartime	p. 10
Soldiers Write the War	p. 34
"No Place for Weaklings"	p. 60
Monuments and Mourning	p. 85
The Split Screen	p. 130
The Outsiders	p. 166
The Victors	p. 200
Conclusion	p. 235
Postscript on Iraq	p. 243
Notes	p. 249
Selected Bibliography	p. 283
Index	p. 287
Illustrations follow page	p. 84
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